[fpgaminer]

The 2.5 million number quoted in the article is "System Logic Cells", not Logic Elements. Near as I can tell, since I haven't kept pace with Xilinx since their 7 series, a "System Logic Cell" is some strange fabricated metric which is arrived at by taking the number of LUTs in the device and multiplying by ~2. In other words, there is no such thing as a System Logic Cell, it's just a translucent number.

Anyway, the FPGAs being used here are, I believe, based on a 6-LUT (6 input, 2 output). So you'd get about 1.25 million 6-LUTs to work with, and some combination of MUXes, flip-flops, distributed RAM, block RAM, DSP blocks, etc.

Supposing Xilinx isn't doing any trickery and you really can use all those LUTs freely, then you'd be able to cram ~2.5 million binary NOTs into the thing (2 NOTs per LUT, since they're two output LUTs). So 2.5 million NOTs per cycle. I don't know what speed it'd run at for such a simple operation. Their mid-range 7 series FPGAs were able to do 32-bit additions plus a little extra logic, at ~450 MHz and consume 16 LUTs for each adder.

[alexforencich]

6-input, 1-output or 5-input, 2-output. They're implemented as a 5-input, 2-output LUT with a bypassable 2:1 mux on the output.